How To Glue Miter Joints-Wait a Minute

Miter joints can be a real source of frustration. The pieces need to be the exact length and the cut surfaces need to be as close to perfect as you can get them. If they don’t look great right off the saw, use a shooting board and a plane, or rub the surfaces on a piece of sandpaper glued to a flat piece of scrap. It doesn’t matter which you use, but your friends won’t be as impressed with your sanding block as they will be with your shooting board. Shavings trump dust every time.

One way to get better joints is to use a glue that is “grabby”. Hot hide glue is grabby, but liquid hide glue isn’t. Good old yellow glue is kind of grabby, but white glue is really grabby. The first step is to put a spot of glue on one side of the joint. You don’t need a special brush and you don’t need to spread it around. Rub the two parts of the joint together.

Open up the joint and you’ll see an even coat of glue on both parts of the joint. But don’t put the joint together yet.

Leave the joint open for a couple of minutes. You might be surprised at what you see as time elapses. The photo below shows what happens to the glue. It wicks up into the pores of the wood, away from the actual joint surface. That’s bad news if you want the joint to hold, but good news if you apply another dab of glue.

The glue from the first round partially dries, and forms a barrier that sticks to the wood and sticks to the second dab of glue.

Put another dab of glue on one side of the joint, put the two pieces together and rub them back and forth. You will feel resistance as the glue grabs. Make sure the two parts are lined up, and set the assembly aside for the glue to dry.

The joint will hold together as long as you don’t mess with it. Glue dries in stages, and just because you can pick up a piece and have it stay together doesn’t mean you can stress the joint. Chemical reactions are taking place, and the moisture in the glue needs to evaporate, and that takes about 24 hours or so.

15 thoughts on “How To Glue Miter Joints-Wait a Minute”

One neat little trick if the pce’s are small is to glue them on a piece paper grocery bag. The paper holds the miter tight and because the paper is a little wet, as the paper dries it actually pulls the joint tighter.

Can’t remember if it’s been on popwood or not, but it works really well to “unfold” the pieces to be mitered, lay them out flat, then put tape across what will be the outside of the joint (stranded packing tape works well), and then apply your glue and “fold up” the joints, taping the last one shut.

This minimizes the need for clamps, lets you use any glue you want, and also makes it more likely to get a good match at the corners, which is critical for a miter joint.

I make up my own liquid hide glue because the commercial one I can buy in England does not grab and is no good for rubbed joints. I use urea to lower the melting point and cook the glue for a couple of days before I use it. When it is cold here I heat it up by standing in warm water. OK it smell a bit but its by far the best glue I have ever used. It will even glue aluminum to wood.

It gives almost instant grab.

Hide glue is one of the few that will stick to itself and can be undone so much the best for me.

Bob,
If my two or three remaining brain cells are correct, I seem to remember an article in Fine Wood Working several years ago that tested various glues for strength. Yellow glue came out on top, again, if memory serves. You, Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton of Woodworking Workshops of the Shenandoah Valley (http://www.wwotsv.com) recommend white glue. Does it really matter? What are the pros and cons of white vs. yellow? Are there some instances where one is better than the other? And finally, why do we drive on the parkway and park on the driveway?

Which glue is the strongest? is an irrelevant question to me. Hide, white and yellow are all more than strong enough. I use all three, and which bottle to pick up depends on factors other than strength. Mostly I make my choices based on “open time”, hide glue if the assembly might take a while, yellow most of the time, white if I want it to grab right away.

But I find that white glue (at least Elmer’s Glue-All) has less initial tack than yellow type I and type II PVA glues. I regularly use it for chair regluing because I can get the chair together and adjust the frame to level and square without having the joints grab too soon. In fact, I thought the aliphatic glues were originally developed for more initial tack.

I read a blog post a few months ago by a guy from Franklin. He described the tests for the different types of PVA glue (yellows and whites, I’m not thinking of epoxies or polyurethane, etc, here) and they mostly have to do with the temperature at which the bond fails (upwards of 150 degrees) and lengthy exposure to water. I’m thinking if a piece of furniture is exposed to temps above 150 degrrees, the wood is also going to fail when the fire gets to that part of the house.

Yes, when I was showing these to Glen the other day, I demonstrated the strength of the bond by throwing one that had dried for a couple days as hard as I could to the concrete floor of our shop. Granted I’m getting old and don’t have the arm I used to, but all four glue joints held.

cool, on another note I’m almost finished with the Arts and craft shelves you have the article about in the Easy Shaker and Arts and Craft projects. I can’t find the Olympic stain in my area. Can you recommend a walnut stain to use?

One of the problems of being in the magazine business is that as soon as we mention a stain by name, the manufacturer either changes the name, discontinues the product entirely, or changes where you can buy the stuff.

What you are looking for is an oil-based stain that is just a stain–no “stain with wax” no “stain and finish all in one”, just a stain with Walnut in the name. If a local paint store still exists in your neighborhood, they should be able to fix you up.

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